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Air India flights disrupted by pilot protest
AFP - Sunday, September 27
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Air India flights disrupted by pilot protest
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NEW DELHI (AFP) - – State-owned Air India said it cancelled 11 flights on Saturday after some pilots reported sick in protest at a decision by the loss-making airline to slash productivity bonuses.
The action by the national flag carrier's non-unionised senior pilots came as India's biggest religious festival season of the year got under way, disrupting travel plans.
"We had to cancel 11 flights as some pilots reported sick but we managed to fly over 250 flights," Air India spokesman Jitender Bharghava told AFP.
Airline management would meet with the pilots on Sunday in Mumbai to discuss their complaints, Bharghava said.
The airline, which is struggling to return to profit, announced last Wednesday cuts of 25 to 50 percent in productivity incentives for more than 7,000 employees, including top management, as part of cost-reduction efforts.
Bhargava said Air India, whose once-dominant market share has shrunk to 16 percent in the face of fierce competition from private carriers, needed to cut expenses to keep flying.
"It's pretty well known that as a state-owned carrier we can't retrench people like Japan Airlines," he said, referring to the Japanese airline's announcement this month that it planned to cut 6,800 jobs in a bid to become profitable again.
The flight cancellations came after the senior pilots' representative, Captain V.K. Bhalla, said "the executive pilots have taken a decision to go on strike because nobody is in a state of mind to work due to the salary cuts."
Bhalla said performance-linked pay incentives account for up to 70 percent of total pay of Air India's senior pilots, who are not unionised.
It was not immediately clear how many of the 319 senior pilots would take part in the protest. But the union which represents the airline's lower-ranked pilots would not replace any senior pilots who did not turn up for work, Indian media outlets reported.
"We are morally with the executive pilots as their salary cut is very steep," said Shailendra Singh, president of the Indian Commercial Pilots Association.
The Air India protest follows a mass pilot "sick-in" two weeks ago at India's second-largest carrier Jet Airways that threw the country's airline travel into chaos for five days.
The Jet Airways pilots were protesting against the dismissal of colleagues who started a union.
Air India, which employs over 31,000 people and pays more than 30 billion dollars in wages annually, posted an 875-million-dollar loss in the financial year to March 31, 2009.
Productivity-linked incentives make up the bulk of its payroll expenses.
India's Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel has said the airline must "shape up" to receive a government bailout expected to total one billion dollars over three years.
The airline has recently advertised in major newspapers worldwide for a chief operating officer to streamline operations and help it emerge from its financial troubles.
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